How Rivers Think
While canoeing down a river in the Amazon rainforest, the artist took water samples containing river sediment and bits of rainforest flora.
Sealed inside customized slides, these samples are preserved as living ecosystems.
This rare viewpoint enables us to see the river in a new way: not through images that represent it (such as a painting or a photograph do), but as the river itself from within, like a body containing endless worlds that are unveiled in this piece.
The title of this piece refers to the book 'How Forests Think' by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, based on his field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Placed in a slide projector tray, the samples are illuminated from within to display the river's inner material life. As bacteria interact with the liquid inside the slides, the projected images continuously transform, never repeating themselves from one pass to the next.
How Rivers Think
80 customized slides containing water from an Amazonian river. 2019
One of the water samples gathered by Oscar while traveling through the 'Kushuimi’ river, as it is called by the local Shuar community.
The water samples are encased in modified vintage 35mm slide mounts.
